Last week I went through the most common objections I hear to working with a book coach. This week, to expand on those concepts, I wanted to outline the dangers of trying to DIY your own book.

Before we get into it, I realize that this is an extreme stance – to say that writing a book on your own is dangerous. I want to acknowledge that it’s clearly NOT actually dangerous. No one’s going to hurt themselves, or anyone else, trying to DIY a book. And of course many writers find book writing to be an enriching, enjoyable, productive, lucrative, and satisfying process. They don’t need any help finding their way. And as I said in last week’s post, if you are finding the joy and the success without sustained professional guidance, then don’t question what you are doing. Keep it up, and enjoy the ride! Ignore me and carry on!

But in my position as a book coach, and as the leader of a team of book coaches, I see a lot of pages from a lot of writers who are hoping to be published. I also see a lot of rejection letters from a lot of agents and a lot of rejections from a lot of publishers – I would guess I have evaluated more than 150 rejection letters this year so far – and there are clear patterns to what writers are doing wrong.

Agents will tell you that they can discern incredibly quickly whether a writer is worthy of a second look -- often within just one page, maybe two. The reason they can make this determination so fast is because, again, there are clear patterns to what writers are doing wrong. Luck and timing absolutely play a role as to why some writers get picked for publication and others don’t, but usually the reasons for rejection are glaringly obvious to a professional. (And these same problems, just to be clear, are the exact same problems that prevent an indie author from attracting readers.)

So the danger that I am talking about is the danger of putting a ton of time and energy and money into a manuscript that falls into one of these clear “fatal” patterns. The danger, in other words, is heartbreak – and that is definitely a danger worth avoiding.

My DIY Failure

I know because I have been there. One of the reasons I became a book coach, in fact, was because I suffered my own DIY failure. I had a fantastic agent who believed in me and an insightful editor at a major publishing house whom I loved working with. I’d written three novels with this supportive team, and the house offered me a three-book deal – but it wasn’t a very good deal. It was kind of a sad deal. My agent and I agreed that we would leave that house and go out to find one who wanted take my career to the next level.

I wrote a book I loved and my agent got people pumped – really pumped. We had a preemptive offer for Italian rights before we even had a US deal. I spoke to a few of the interested editors and they were super enthusiastic. They all had ideas for how the novel might be tweaked to become stronger because that’s what editors do, but they loved the book. There was so much love. My agent set an auction date and expected six houses to bid. I was on the edge of glory!

And then on auction day, no one bid. Not one house. No one could get the support – in other words, the big bucks – that we were asking for. So then I had nothing – not the original okay offer from my wonderful editor and not a shiny new offer.

It was heartbreaking, and I felt like an idiot for walking away from the original offer. Think of your worst soul-crushing day. That was this day.

So I said to myself, “Screw them! I’ll do it myself! I’ll show them! I’ll self-publish this sucker and sell so many copies they’ll all be sorry.”

I slammed some beta readers through it and changed a few things. I slapped together a cover – myself. I did a quick proofread – myself. I laid the book out – myself. I dreamed up a launch strategy that relied mostly on my friends and family because I had done nothing in my previous incarnation as a writer to build up a following or connect with readers who had enjoyed my other six books, and didn’t know that I should. Those were the old days, the almost-pre-Internet days, the days when publishers “did it all” (except that they didn’t, really, but that’s a story for another day), and I didn’t understand the way readers find books now, the way writers have to be advocates for their creation.

I published the book about 5 years ago and have sold to date somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 copies – which is higher than the average the vast majority of self-published books sell. The book is the novel Perfect Red and I’m not even going to link to it because I’m embarrassed that it’s even up on Amazon – too embarrassed to even do what I have to do to take it down. I just want to pretend like it never happened.

Some kind readers have read it and told me that it’s pretty good. And I know there are things about it that are good and even great. But I also know that it has some glaring errors. That’s what I get for trying to DIY.

And that’s why I am such a fierce advocate for professional help. I was a professional – a writer who had sold six books, and done countless signings, and readings, and events. I went on tour for three years with a corporate sponsor for my breast cancer memoir, and did television, radio, live events. I went on the Rosie O’Donnell show. I was a pro. But even a pro can’t always clearly see her own work for what it is. That's why publishing houses employ editors.

Did I have bad luck? Perhaps. Bad timing? Maybe. But the real reason for the failure and the heartbreak was clearly my own hubris. It’s almost impossible to be totally discerning about your own writing.

This failure is one of the reasons I am a good book coach and one of the reasons I believe in it so completely. It's my mission to save writers from the heartbreak of believing that you can do it all yourself.

I recently started work with two writers whose stories I want to share because they show how working with a coach can prevent this pain. These are not stories meant to show how smart I am: they are stories about how just a little professional guidance at the right time can mean the difference between success and failure. I wish I had sought it out before I published Perfect Red.

Writer A came to me with a finished novel – sci fi YA – which she hoped to polish up before submission. She had been working on it for a long time and felt relatively confident in her effort – among other reasons because she is a creative writing teacher at a high school and knows her stuff. But I asked her a few basic questions about the point of the book, the desire of the characters – and she couldn’t answer. She had a super cool scenario, but had not done any of the deep work that would make the narrative hold together over the course of a whole book. I also looked at her first chapter and there were glaring errors in the first pages that would make any agent say no and any reader pick up another book. Those errors were info dumps and head-hopping (moving from one character’s head to another within the same paragraph or scene.) These are extremely common problems.

The amazing thing was that this writer was really talented in all other writerly ways. She just hadn’t done the deep story work she needed to do, and she had few bad habits she simply could not see. “I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles,I wasn’t writing info dumps,” she later said to me. And yet she was…

We worked together for four weeks to nail down the internal logic of her story, and then she re-wrote those opening pages four times. I made her go back four times to the same five pages. I kept marking the info dumps and the head-hopping until she could see them herself, and avoid them. Then we followed the logic we had hammered out, and she wrote forward from there, revising her story as we went.

She is almost finished with a revised draft of her novel. There are no info dumps anywhere in sight and the POV problems are completely gone. The narrative is seamless and riveting. I am not exaggerating when I say that her work has brought tears to my eyes. It’s SO good. It’s a thousand times better than it was before. It has a thousand times better chance of finding an audience.

Writer B is a New York Times bestselling writer, a person who has an option to sell her next book at a big imprint of a Big 5 publishing house. She came to me to get some polish edits on a proposal for that next book – actually it was for a pair of nonfiction books -- and I took one look at her proposal and said, “You can’t send this in.” I was 100% certain that she wasn’t going to get the reception she wanted at the publishing house because her proposal was a wreck.

The error she was making is also very common: spending WAY too long ramping up to the point before she landed on the actual point. There was backstory, explanation, a whole defensive tone. There was also the problem of a fuzzy concept – another very common error especially with nonfiction writers who know their topics so well they can’t see the forest for the trees. The two book design was a clunky solution to the fact that she wasn’t sure of her point or her purpose.

We did the same thing I did with Writer A -- the genre never matters because the process of strategic thinking is the same. We spent about three weeks going back to basics, digging into the deep logic of the point she wanted to make and the readers she wanted to serve and how to move from her past success to her next success. The work had very little to do with writing, to be honest, and everything to do with just being intentional.

Writer B tore her work down to the studs and built it back up – and just a month later, she has the bones of a really fantastic proposal. We are working to flesh it out now, but it just HUMS with purpose – and I hardly have to touch a word she writes because it has so much authority and so much style. Odds are very high that she is going to pull in a juicy deal.

These are not isolated cases. At Author Accelerator, I have 23 book coaches on our team, and each of them guides writers through this transformation all the time.

Are we promising the moon? A 6-house auction with a million-dollar advance? No we are not. But we are promising that we will see your work for what it really is, and help you to make it the best it can be.

The Dangers of DIY

So here are the dangers of DIY as I see them.

Danger #1: Perpetuating the narrative that you are a genius who shouldn’t have to work hard, invest in developing your skills, or take too much time to develop a book. There are many versions of this narrative out there, including the one that says your brilliance will be proven when your book gets scooped up in an agent auction, bought for millions, and sold to the movies. The danger here is that you are tying your worthiness as a writer to an outcome you can’t control. You want to be elevated, lifted up, made to seem as if you didn’t even have to try. In this scenario, trying almost becomes a dirty word. Seeking help? Even dirtier. In thinking this way, you are focusing on product, not process; setting yourself up for failure; and limiting your chances of real, attainable success.

Danger #2:Holding on too tightly to your idea – which shuts out the world, which shuts out the reader, and which limits your ability to delight the reader, which is all any writer really wants.

Danger #3: Writing from a place of fear and doubt – which isolates you, stunts your creativity, and tends to lead to projects that never get finished, manuscripts that never see the light of day, and misplaced notions about making your book “perfect” before you show it to anyone -- which is often too late.

Danger #4: Wasted time. You work and work and work as you DIY your book, and you try and try and try, maybe joining a writing group, maybe signing up from time to time for online video classes, in-person day-long workshops, or writing retreats but only getting a quick shot of inspiration and support, or only learning about isolated skills like how to write a scene or how to craft dialogue or how to pitch an agent. These are good things to be sure – really good things -- but they are not actually teaching you how to write a book, or how to write this book. And after years (and sometimes years and years), you step out in to the world with it -- and it doesn’t go how you wanted. You realize you have to throw out a ton of pages, or worse, consider giving up.

There is a time and place for writing groups and courses and conferences and retreats (I’m at a conference even as we speak!) but it doesn’t replace the power of sustained, professional attention on your book.

You don't have to work with a coach or editor forever to get the benefit. For most people, you can make transformative progress in six months -- which is the timeframe I recommend, and on which the Author Accelerator programs are based.

Danger #5: Self-loathing. If you’ve wasted years on a book that falls flat, now on top of fear and doubt, you have self-loathing thrown into the mix. What did I do wrong? How could I have been so mistaken? Maybe I actually suck! Odds are really good that you don’t suck – you probably just need to shore up your skills, fix some habits, and keep working.

Will working with a pro cost money? Yes, the same way that belonging to a gym costs money, or going on guided tour of the beaches of Normandy costs money, or taking a course on how to code a computer costs money.

But listen: If you are called to write a book – if you can’t walk away – and the DIY approach has not been going well, perhaps it’s time to own up to that reality. Declare that it matters to you – a lot – to raise your voice and tell your story in the best way you can. Embrace that it is a complex, many-layered, multi-faceted undertaking that takes time to master. And let yourself believe that you are worthy of giving it your best shot, which means investing in your skills and your growth, which may well mean working with a pro.

Next week I’ll look at the “So how do you know which book coach or editor to trust?” part of the question. Also, “What is the difference between a coach and all the different kinds of editors anyway?”

This piece is the third in a series – and just a warning: it’s a long post. It will probably take you about 15 minutes to read, and there is a second part coming next week.

If you have a writing process that is working for you, none of this advice applies. If you are feeling satisfied and on track with your writing life, and making the progress you want to make, and achieving your goals and feeling good – I salute you and urge you to keep doing what you are doing. After all, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! I am, instead, speaking here to writers whose DIY efforts are not paying off – who have a nagging sense that they are stuck, or spinning their wheels, or going backwards -- and who may be looking for another way forward.

In last week’s post, A Brief History of Book Coaching (link directly above), I talked about the emergence of book coaching as the publishing industry has changed, and before that, in the Making the Unconscious Conscious post, I discussed the general benefit of coaching – of having a mentor, advisor, or guide to help you learn and grow while mastering a complex undertaking. Inherent in both these posts is the idea that trying to DIY a book is a risky undertaking – which is the idea I want to dig into today.

This stance – that there are dangers in trying to DIY a book – is going to make some people upset. I am thinking here of the five most common objections I hear about book coaching. I’m going to go through them one at a time:

Objection #1: “You’re a book coach who sells book coaching services so of course you’re going to say that people shouldn’t DIY their book. You’re just trying to take people’s money.”

I hear this a lot, sometimes stated with incredible vitriol. My answer is that YES I run a book coaching business and I am ABSOLUTELY trying to make money. I am not, in fact, doing this work out of the goodness of my heart. I am working every day to build a sustainable company that offers a service that is so valuable, writers are happy to pay for it. If we can’t delight writers and have a deep impact on their work and help them reach their goals, we have no business being in business.

I have a fierce belief that helping writers bring their ideas into the world matters. Maya Angelou said, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you,” and a lot of people suffer from this particular agony. They want to raise their voice, rise above the noise, stake their claim. Whether they are writing a “light” middle-grade fantasy or an epic sci fi thriller, a how-to book for empowering women executives or a cookbook for vegetarians, somewhere deep inside them in a person who just wants to be heard. They want someone to understand their idea or their vision and say, “I GET that, and I LOVE that and I NEED that.”

I honestly believe that helping writers stop talking about writing their books and actually write them can lift them up, and lift up their readers. Imagine if more people felt heard!

I am in the middle of reading Phil Knight’s memoir Shoe Dog – he’s the guy who created Nike – and I am finding it incredibly inspiring, mostly because it turns out that Knight really believes in shoes. In the early days of his company – during the era of Nixon and the Vietnam War – fitness was a not embraced in America the way it is now, and Knight believed that running could make everything better. It made his own life better – the striving, the solitude, the high from moving your body the way it was meant to move – and he wanted everyone to have that same opportunity. Making better shoes and selling them to more people was totally about making money, but the whole thing was built on Knight’s core-level passion. I love that one of the most massive global brands began with that kind of belief. We could talk all day about problems that arise from such a brand – issues of the use of natural resources, income inequality – but let’s not.

Let’s just stick with the idea that someone who is making money building a company based on a particular mission may in fact actually believe in that thing.

I believe in helping writers raise their voices, and I believe that they best way for them to do it is under the guidance of a book coach. No one actually needed to wear a Nike shoe back in the day to run a couple miles through their neighborhood, or to participate in a Thanksgiving-day 5K run. They could have worn a pair of Adidas shoes, or a no-name athletic shoe, or gone barefoot. But if buying a pair of Nikes was the thing that inspired them to get outside and run, to believe they were capable of it, to actually make it happen? Totally worth the investment.

Investing in book coaching takes more of a leap of faith than buying a pair of shoes, but the principle is the same. We put our money into the products, services, and business we value. If you value the idea you have for a story, or the idea you have for a book that can teach, inform and inspire a reader – if you value your voice – why wouldn’t you invest in a professional guide to help you make your dream come true?

Objection #2: “Great and beloved works were written by writers working alone! Think of Jane Austen! Think of Dickens! Think of JK Rowling on the train and in the café toiling away in glorious solitude!”

People come at me all the time with this argument. The writers change, but the concept is the same: Brilliant writers don’t need no stinkin’ help. Genius happens in isolation! Great writing comes like a flash of lightning from God! Leave me alone and let me just write my flippin’ book and one day when my brilliance is unleashed on the world, you’ll see what I mean!

Okay, so yes, let’s acknowledge that some genius writers do in fact produce amazing work in total isolation, just as some genius writers produce amazing work in six frenzied weeks or without ever revising or because it all came to them perfectly whole in a dream and all they had to do was dictate it onto the page. But for the vast majority – by which I am going to guess 99.99% -- these miracles of creation never happen, but instead people toil away for many years, with the help of many shepherds, guides, writing partners, editors, coaches, and friends, until they finish and publish a book.

They toil away – that’s the point, and that’s the problem. Part of your brain wants to skip the toil part. You want to skip the hard work and the pain and the doubt and the suffering and just get right to the part where your work is unleashed to wild acclaim and an adoring audience and a movie deal.

I get the dream. I mean, I really get it. I want it, too. I have spent more years than I would like to admit believing in my heart that I am in the .01% and that it was just a matter of writing one more book until the rest of the world knew it too. I am 53 years old. I’ve written 8 books, and many thousands of words in blog posts and course curriculum and I finally get that I am not, in fact, part of the .01%. I finally see that success comes from simply doing the work. And that is why I believe book coaching works. We help you do the work. We help you shake off the myth of genius, and do the work, deadline after deadline.

My guru and guide in this idea is the great choreographer Twyla Tharp, whose book The Creative Habithas done more to inform my thinking and make me who I am as a writer, a book coach, and an entrepreneur than any other. Here is what she says in the introduction:

“I will keep stressing the point about creativity being augmented by routine and habit. Get used to it. In these pages a philosophical tug of war will periodically rear its head. It is the perennial debate, born in the Romantic era, between the beliefs that all creative acts are born of (a) some transcendent, inexplicable Dionysian act of inspiration, a kiss from God on your brow that allows you to give the world The Magic Flute, or (b) hard work. If it isn’t obvious already, I come down on the side of hard work. That’s why this book is call The Creative Habit. Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits. That’s it in a nutshell.”

Tharp also has a powerful answer to the But what about ____________ [fill in genius here]? objection. Here she is refuting the greatest of all “struck by lightning” myths:

“Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose. That’s the missing element in the popular portrait of Mozart. Certainly, he had a gift that set him apart from others. He was the most complete musician imaginable, one who wrote for all instruments in all combinations, and no one has written greater music for the human voice. Still, few people, even those hugely gifted, are capable of the application and focus that Mozart displayed throughout his short life. As Mozart himself wrote to a friend, “People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.” Mozart’s focus was fierce; it had to be for him to deliver the music he did in his relatively short life, under the conditions he endured, writing in coaches and delivering scores just before curtain went up, dealing with the distractions of raising a family and the constant need for money. Whatever scope and grandeur you attach to Mozart’s musical gift, his so-called genius, his discipline and work ethic were its equal.”

I hope we can agree to abandon the idea that genius is what drives the creation of most books, and I hope that allows us to also give up on the “creativity happens in isolation” myth, too – which was supposed to be part of this second objection, but is going to bleed into the third one, too.

Objection #3: “A book coach or editor is going to mess with my vision and my voice and I have to protect it.”

This is a corollary of the genius myth – the idea that real writers don’t need help, and that help, in fact, is risky. This objection often shows up as a writer asking if they should copyright their idea (before they have even written a word), or worrying about pitching a book idea to an agent because they fear that someone will steal it. These writers lock their ideas away like they are precious jewels, but guess what? Artists and writers steal ideas every second. Read Austen Kleon’s Steal Like an Artistfor a super entertaining exploration of this concept.

You are not selling anyone your idea. As Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, says: “The market rewards execution, not ideas.”

Or if you prefer this truth delivered in a slightly more literary way, here’s what Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, the author of the A Series of Unfortunate Events books), says: “It is never the idea and always the way it is told.”

This fear of external input also shows up in writers asking professionals like me if their idea is “worth pursuing.” The asker of this question is focusing only on the end-product and not on the process of creativity.

You can’t even TALK about “worth” unless you MAKE the thing. There are absolutely no guarantees unless you make the thing and put it in front of readers. As the novelist John Cheever said, “I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone.”

A book only works if it impacts a reader. In order to write well, you therefore need to think about your reader and who she is and what she needs and what would delight her. It’s very, very difficult to do this in isolation because we are all stuck in our own minds. That’s the human condition. And that’s exactly why we love books – because they give us a chance to get into someone else’s head for a minute to see what it’s like in there.

If a book is seen in this way – as a invitation to a reader to look out from a different perspective – you can see why it makes perfect, logical sense to bring other people into the creative process at key points along the way so that you can see if you writing in a way that makes room for the reader, invites them in, and engages them.

That is exactly what a book coach or an editor does. They are not out to change your voice or co-opt your story or make it their own or ruin your mojo. They are there to be a mirror, to reflect back to you what you are doing so you can see if you are doing it effectively, and to the best of your ability. They are there to help you write the best book you can.

Take a look at almost any acknowledgments page in almost any book on your bookshelf. You will see a long list of people who helped the writer – who gave them places to write, or money to support them while they wrote, or read drafts, or batted around ideas, or cleaned up prose, or pushed them to keep going when they thought they should quit. I can guarantee you that every one of those people listed “messed” with that writer’s vision in some profound way. They listened to the writer explain what they were trying to do and they reacted to it. Many of them were down in the weeds in the words and the pages and the chapter, getting their hands dirty to help that writer bring their vision to life.

Writers almost universally adore their coaches and their editors and their copy editors and their proofreaders and their writing partners, because having someone pay close attention to your work is validating, comforting, and powerful. I had the great privilege of publishing six books with Big 5 publishers and I adored being edited by smart, savvy, compassionate women who somehow knew far better than I did what I was really writing about.

This quote from Kelly Barnhill, recent winner of the Newbery Award for The Girl Who Drank the Moon, captures the joy of being edited in beautiful detail:

“I sat down, over months and months, and wrote a story. Then I erased that story and recomposed it from memory. Then I erased itagain, and recomposed it again. The story lived in my eyes and my fingers. It lived in my messy hair and my wool socks and my fuzzy slippers. It lived on my skin. It lived in my mouth. It lived in my ears. And then I sold it to a publisher, and the publisher said, “I love it! Let’s change everything!” And so I did. It’s called the editorial process, and it is a magic thing. Editors are people who have eyes made of titanium and tongues made of steel. Their hearts are carefully built of the most delicate and complicated clockwork gears in the world. They never sleep. They never eat. They are fed on starlight and birdsong and the dreams of children. And they are almost always right. So I changed lots of things and rewrote lots of things and the story I wrote became the story it could be, and that has made all the difference.”

Objection #4: “I don’t need professional guidance. I have an awesome writing group.”

Maybe your writing group is, in fact, awesome – but I would urge you to consider how, exactly, is it awesome. Is it offering you a chance to talk about writing and writers, and to get encouragement for your efforts, and to share the trials and tribulations of the creative journey? Does it give you access to fresh baked goodies and wine and a chance to be among people you consider to be your people? Are your writer friends some of your best friends? These are really excellent reasons to get together in community to support each other’s work – an activity I highly endorse -- but even if you have all this, you may want to analyze whether or not writing group is helping you become a better writer. They may, in fact, be keeping you from reaching that goal.

I know this because I see the end-result of dysfunctional writing groups every day – manuscripts that writers claim their writing groups just loved, but that are riddled with glaring errors and fatal flaws.

I wrote several posts about the hidden dangers of writing groups, which you can read HERE at Jane Friedman’s blog and HERE so I won't go into this now.

The point, in a nutshell, is that your writing group friends can offer you support and community and inspiration, and they can react to your work and give their opinions on it, but they are not usually trained to analyze WHY it’s not working nor to give you assistance in improving your skills and developing a sustained narrative. A professional is.

Objection #5: “All my friends think of me as `the writer’ and if I get help, it means I’m admitting that I’m a fraud and that will shake my identity to the core.”

Okay, this is not an objection that anyone voices out loud, but it’s one that is there, all the same, running under everything like a riptide. A lot of people who are now working on writing books were excellent students in college, or they are currently paid to write for their job – i.e. they are a lawyer, a communications pro, a PR expert, an English teacher, a popular blogger -- so it makes sense that they think of themselves as a writer. They are probably passionate readers and leaders of their book clubs. They are probably the person who friends turn to for help on grammar, or on a college application essay for their kid, or the brochure copy for a new business venture. But strong writing skills don’t always translate directly to writing a sustained narrative that holds a readers’ attention.

I have been digging into this concept of shame and vulnerability in asking for help. I have, in fact, been seeking out writers who chose not to work with me, or who had a lot of objections to working with me before we started, and some of these people have bravely shared with me details about this particular objection. Here is a typical response from a writer who has been working with me for a couple months:

“I felt a lot of shame around asking for help because I think I do pretty well on the technical details of writing (I'm kind of a grammar snob) and other people often told me I was good at writing. I felt like I was good at writing, and I felt like seeking help was admitting that none of that stuff was actually true about me.I think it might be true for a lot of people - that they are known as `the writer' in front of their friends, their family, whoever they tell about their work, and admitting that they are seeking help might make them feel like they were `cheating’ by not going it alone. This is what held me back from asking for help many, many times. But now I see that there were things about my story that I DID NOT UNDERSTAND and could not understand because of what I was never taught. You helped me understand those things and what my story lacked and where it was failing.”

“Vulnerability is not weakness, and the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure we face every day are not optional. Our only choice is a question of engagement. Our willingness to own and engage with our vulnerability determines the depth of our courage and the clarity of our purpose; the level to which we protect ourselves from being vulnerable is a measure of our fear and disconnection.”

And she also says this:

“Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.”

Asking for help is a primary way we let ourselves and our hopes and dreams be seen – and so is writing a book.

Now that we understand the objections to working with a book coach, we can better understand the dangers of trying to DIY your book. I intended to do that here but this post went on way too long, so I’ll discuss those in my blog next Friday, and then after that, I’ll talk about how to decide whom to trust if you decide you want to try a professional guide for your writing life.

Book coaching is a profession that has emerged as a result of the changing forces in book publishing over the last decade. When mainstream publishers had a death-grip on the means of production and distribution of books, when they were the gatekeepers and curators of every book that was made available to the public, the work of a book coach was done “in house” by employees of the publishers. There was time to get each project ready for prime time, and time to nurture a writer’s career.

Editors often purchased book projects that were not fully cooked. If a book and a writer showed promise, they would give the writer an “advance” against sales, and then work with the writer to do what had to be done to get their idea into publishable shape. As a result, deep bonds formed between editors and writers, as the editors shepherded the writers’ work to fruition – think Maxwell Perkins guiding F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway; or Ursula Nordstrom guiding Maurice Sendak and E.B. White.

If you haven’t read about those times or those publishing relationships, I highly recommend that you do. I can promise you that Nordstrom edited some of your favorite books because she edited Goodnight Moon, Charlotte's Web, Where the Wild Things Are, Harold and the Purple Crayon and The Giving Tree, among others.

Her letters are collected in the book Dear Genius by Leonard Marcus. You can follow her chatting with her writers about the rain, their gardens, the nuances of their work, and deeper matters of the human spirit. The New York Times Book Review wrote of Nordstrom, “When troubles of a deeper sort -- depression, writer's block, money worries -- struck, she was there, shoring up egos, prodding when necessary, securing advances. A long letter to Maurice Sendak, who, at 33, had written her in despair, is a model of selfless concern for a young man suffering doubt. She argues vehemently on behalf of his talent, cautioning him against comparing himself negatively with great writers. ''You may not be Tolstoy,'' she reasons, ''but Tolstoy wasn't Sendak, either.''

If you are a lover of books and writing and the creative spirit, Dear Genius will make you swoon

As for Maxwell Perkins, there is a movie about him called Genius, but I don’t recommend it. It’s pretty dull and lifeless. Better to read about Fitzgerald’s editing process, and Perkins’ role in it, in The Artful Edit by Susan Bell – another book I highly recommend. It’s a simple and clear breakdown of how to look at a piece from a macro level and a micro level, with fantastic editing examples from famous authors and their famous books.

The point of all this is that back in the day, a writer’s job was largely just to write. The myth of the lone genius in the attic or the garret was deeply entrenched in the lore of what it meant to be a writer, and the editor was the person who did everything else: got the work ready to publish, worked with the sales and marketing people, worked with the money people, worked with the cover artists, fielded requests for interviews and so on.

Publishing was a business built on the hunches of these editors. Each “product” was a totally new thing, unlike, say, toothpaste or cars, which could be mass produced. So the editors were charged with discerning what the reading public would buy. A blessing from them could turn the book into a mass-market hit, and make the writer’s entire career. Writers who were not chosen had no option but to set their work aside and try again, or take up some other creative endeavor.

Well, that’s not entirely true. A person with enough money in the bank could go to a “vanity publisher,” who would produce their book for a fee. These books were frowned upon by pretty much everyone because they had not been vetted and chosen.

This paradigm of the publishing industry was still largely in place when I graduated from college in 1986 and took a job working for two editors – one fiction and one nonfiction – at Ballantine Books, a division of Random House. Writers were still submitting their typed manuscripts through the mail. We had stacks and stacks of rubber-band-bound manuscripts in manila-padded envelopes in the office, towering so high they threatened to topple. I typed up the rejection letters that my editor bosses had written by hand on yellow legal pads, typed out the writer’s addresses on the envelopes, and walked them down to the mailroom.

A Seismic Shift in Publishing

Soon after I started at Random House, however, things began to change. Writers began to use word processors and to submit their work printed out by dot matrix printers or saved on floppy discs. Communication could happen instantly by fax machine. I took a job at a slick city magazine, and when I started, the art department was still cutting and pasting the text to lay out the pages. They used X-Acto knives and glue. While I was there, we were introduced to a digital graphical layout system, which was magical in its power and functionality, and wildly glitchy.

We all know what happened next: The world sped up – fast. The Internet, email, social media, and digital tools arose to allow content to be easily, instantly, and widely disseminated. In a relatively short period of time, the tools to self-publish became available, and e-books began grabbing significant market share. The sea changes that had already hit the music industry hit publishing, and now anyone could easily and instantly publish anything they wanted. And if they could find a way to connect with an audience, they could produce a hit and, in some cases, make a lot of money without ever bringing in a publishing professional.

The traditional publishing industry did not react very quickly to these changes – and in some cases, they still haven’t fully adapted. A case in point is the fact that a traditionally published book still takes approximately a year and a half to go from finished manuscript to finished book. Contrast that with the fact that an independently published e-book could be made available in, well, a few hours.

As their businesses got pushed and squeezed by the changes, publishers began to spend less and less time nurturing writers. Editors became more focused on acquisition – finding and purchasing books that would be big hits – and less focused on editorial development. There simply wasn’t time for them to work with writers in the way they used to. They needed to find books and produce books and get books into the hands of readers faster than they used to. They needed projects that were less of a risk, or in other words, already finished, already well-polished, and, increasingly, with the promise of big sales built into the mix.

One person I spoke to who until recently worked as an acquisitions editor at a major publishing house said that she shepherded 50 books a year through the system. There is not much room in that program for nurturing the writer or developing an idea or building a career.

And so the work that used to be done by in-house editors – the slow work of developing books from scratch, polishing a work to perfection and helping writers improve their craft – started to be outsourced to freelance editors and book coaches, and in some cases, to agents who have an affinity for the hands-on developmental process.

A book coach is like a shepherd. We are committed to guiding you through the development of your entire book project -- from idea to solid rough draft; from rough draft to revised draft; from revised draft to ready-to-pitch or -publish draft.

Working with a book coach is an investment in your career. It’s making a statement that you are serious about your work. When you work with a book coach, you are no longer trying to DIY the complex undertaking of writing a book that engages a reader. You are seeking sustained professional help.

Next week, I’ll talk about the DIY mentality when it comes to writing books, and about how to know whom to trust with your writing when you’re ready to make the investment.

I was an athlete in high school and college – a tennis player and a squash player – and I loved almost everything about it: the clear goals, the direct line between practice and performance, the sense of community among teammates, and the unmitigated joy of executing a shot or a strategy exactly right. I haven’t actually picked up a racket (well, other than ping pong) for more than a dozen years, because I traded those joys for other ones – namely raising children, and writing books. I can, however, still close my eyes and feel what it felt like play – the rhythm of it, the power of being in the zone, the way life zoomed in on a few lines painted on the ground and a small ball.

Another thing I deeply love about athletics is the fact that no one expects you to do it alone. Even with individual sports like tennis or squash or swimming (which my kids did competitively), no one expects you to figure out how to get good all by yourself. You turn to coaches to learn the rules and the basic skills, and then you turn to them to learn how to improve -- how to move your body, adjust your mindset, understand the strategy of the game, and the psychology of your opponent.

I remember once a coach wanted me to add a spin serve to me repertoire, and in order to do it, I had to completely change the way I was serving the ball – where my feet where placed, how I gripped the racket, how I swung my arm. We broke the whole motion down and built it back up. For weeks, I felt awkward and ineffective, frustrated and angry, as the ball kept winging all over the place – into the ground, over the fence. I lost every match I played and it seemed as though I was getting worse, not better, but my coach kept making me do it again and again and again, and then when it started to work, he put tennis ball cans in the corners of the service box, and made me aim for those again and again and again until I could hit them a reasonable percentage of the time. In other words, he pushed me to practice until I mastered the skill.

You need a coach to watch and to witness so they can reflect back to you what you are doing well and what you are not doing well. You need a coach to show you what you can become, to believe that you are capable of getting there, and to guide you on that journey. With a coach, there’s a built-in belief in the process – and the promise -- of ongoing improvement.

I also played the piano and the flute as a child – badly, and not for very long – but my sister was very talented musically, and went on to earn a PhD in music theory. She, too, had coaches – choral instructors and piano teachers who listened and discerned and pushed and cajoled so that she could learn how to sing and to play. I remember listening to her play scales and snippets of nocturnes over and over and over again.

This concept of disciplined practicing in music is the subject of a fabulous essay by Penelope Trunk about her 11-year-old son’s cello audition for Julliard. Trunk talks about the critical role of a coach in the process:

“When [my son] told his teacher, Amy Barston, he was bored, she told him boredom in practice comes from a lack of engagement. She showed him how to recognize disengagement. Then she taught him to look more closely at each note and listen more deeply with his ears and his heart.

He learned to practice by changing the rhythm of the piece. He learned to play one note at a time with a tuner. He learned to play each measure with a different metronome timing, and then he played the piece so slowly it took 20 minutes instead of just four.

During these insane lessons where Amy and my son spent one hour on five notes, the more we worked on the art of practicing the more I saw that practice is a method to do anything ambitious and difficult. He learned to create a system and process instead of just focusing on the goal itself.”

We expect to have a system and a process for improvement, and coaches to get us there, in athletics and in music. We also expect to have systems and coaches in the workplace, where seasoned professionals take new employees under their wing to show them how things work.

So why, when it comes to writing a book, do we so readily ignore the concept of process, and overlook the importance of mentors who can guide us? A book is a fantastically complex creation that attempts to capture time and emotion and make a meaningful point or argument in a logical cohesive whole. It’s not an easy thing to do. Why do we imagine that we should be able to find our way alone, especially when most of us have never been taught how to do it in the first place?

Even when we seek help in writing, we tend not to seek the kind of sustained help that turns an amateur athlete into an accomplished one, or a fledging musician into someone who can command the stage. We sign up for short-term or one-off or ad hoc programs, where we may learn to write better dialogue or craft a scene or develop a pitch, but where we don’t learn to write a book.

The truth is that reading a book or a blog about writing can’t teach you to write a book. Attending a three-day conference can’t teach you to write a book. Taking a 6- or 8- or 10-week workshop can’t teach you how to write a book. Scoring a writing retreat at a beautiful cabin in the woods where they bring you lunch in a basket can’t teach you to write a book. Even getting an MFA doesn’t necessarily teach you to write a book. These endeavors do other things for writers -- give us a sense of community, teach us certain discrete skills we may employ when writing a book, provide inspiration for the journey -- but they don't get us all the way to the end goal.

You can certainly learn to write a book by trial and error, over time – I did that, several times -- but it’s not like throwing a pot on the wheel or singing a song where it might take 10 or 20 minutes to try and fail. Writing a book usually takes years, especially when you’re throwing out more pages than you keep. Trying and failing takes a significant chunk of time, and because of that, the result is that many writers don’t end up gaining the mastery they need to succeed. The frustration eats at them – because, as Maya Angelou said, "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

Book coaching is about giving writers a better way forward – a way to learn and grow and deepen your craft under the guidance of someone who can watch and witness, who can guide you toward success, and give you a repeatable process to follow to get you closer towards mastery.

Atul Gawande, the writer-surgeon whose recent memoir, Being Mortal was a massively popular bestseller, wrote a piece for The New Yorker several years ago about inviting a fellow surgeon into the operating room to watch him operate so that – at the peak of his powers -- he could learn how to get even better, and also fend off the eventuality of getting worse. The article is called Personal Best, and it is a powerful argument for why anyone at any stage of their career can benefit from inviting scrutiny. “No matter how well trained people are,” Gawande writes, “few can sustain their best performance on their own. That’s where coaching comes in.”

Gawunde later explained the four stages of mastery at the heart of the coaching process (which you can listen to him explain in this video, but here is what he says):

“Improvement comes from taking unconscious incompetence, bringing it to conscious incompetence, and then when you’re aware of the problem, bringing you to conscious competence and then getting you so comfortable with mastering a new set of capabilities so that it becomes part of your unconscious competence. And that cycle is what we all go through over and over again as we begin trying anything that’s hard to do….

There’s deliberate practice that you have to engage in that’s technical… that makes the difference between people who get great results and people who don’t. There’s talent – absolutely to be sure, but there is no talent that comes ready-made with perfection at the kinds of complex skills that there are out in the world.

Deliberate practice is taking someone who has a set of talents and getting that person to practice deliberately what they are not good at. And what people who are great at what they do are really great at is practicing the stuff that they weren’t good at – finding it, identifying it, and being able to cycle through….

The teaching model has believed that you can figure that out for yourself… and the coaching model says, “That’s incredibly naïve.” It is unconscious failure that is the source of the problem, and you need the external eyes and ears to help you become aware of where you are.”

A book coach provides those external eyes and ears. A book coach understands that the alchemy that turns an idea into a book is a process that can be broken down, studied and improved.

Next week, I will explore why book coaching came to exist – what, in other words, changed since the golden age of great editors like Maxwell Perkins – and then I will explain what the very first thing a book coach does when they connect with a writer, and how you can learn to hone this skill, too.